I just returned from a 10-day trip to the Sacred Valley in Peru on a retreat that I can best describe as the gentlest medicine journey of all time, except the medicine was simply the mountains, breath, community, and cosmology.

After all of the expansion and being out of my regular relationship with time and space, I’m having a jarring experience of not quite knowing how to return to life with email, conversion rates, and calendar invites.

Re-integrating with my husband, my kids, my home, and friends has been pretty delicious. Re-integrating with some of the items on my to do list has felt discordant.

I’m doing my best to simply be with the contrast rather than try to fix it all right now as I sit outside and write while the golden afternoon sun and early fall breeze cast dancing shadows of leaves on the patio furniture.

At this moment, one daughter is inside taking her first guitar lesson. The other is with me out here practicing her cello.

I’m asking myself, right now in real time: “What if I could just be with what’s the most real right now instead of resisting my resistance to what feels like the ‘pretend’ world of commerce that measures itself against metrics that have little to do with the heart or soul?”

What if I just sit here and tell you the truth while listening to my girls make music?

Which is exactly, I think, what my friend Ryan Levesque would tell me to do.

A few years back he was days from signing a deal to sell his rapidly-grown company for $70M and then the deal fell apart.

He was devastated, but what looked like a closed door at the time turned into an opening that revolutionized him and his family’s life.

The minute Ryan started sharing about his new book, Return to Real, my mouth was watering for what I sensed was going to be an affirming path forward for those of us who are craving an alternative to the ever-increasing speed of a world run on technology, ever chasing more.

I was not disappointed. I read Ryan’s book in full in the 24 hours before I sat down with Ryan for Plenty while I travelled back to Nashville after spending some time up in Maine this summer and I was moved and enthralled the whole time.

I woke up that next morning of the interview in complete delight and awe that part of what I do for work is read things I’m deeply interested in and then have the authors show up on my doorstep to answer any question I have about them and their work.

When I started Plenty in September of 2024, I committed to only doing interviews in real life. It’s impractical, yes. It’s completely unscalable. But it’s also magical. And it proves what Ryan’s book is all about: that the most meaningful (and sometimes even the most financially fruitful) things in life and business don’t come from reaching for more. They come from returning to real.

If you feel like the pace of life and commerce is moving faster than you’d like in a direction that you don’t even like, you’re going to love this conversation.

Press play on my conversation with Ryan about what happened after his $70M deal fell apart and he started questioning the life he’d built.

 

 

My laptop is on its final moments of battery as I sit here listening to guitar and cello notes wind around each other in an accidental harmony from inside and outside the house. I don’t have a neat conclusion about what all of this means for how I work or what I build next.

But I’m game to live in the question.

What actually wants to come through me next? Not because it’s bigger, faster, or more scalable. But perhaps, because it’s more human.

That’s the conversation Ryan and I had. And it landed in my life at exactly the right moment. I hope it’s the same for you.

🎧 Listen to my conversation with Ryan here.

 

Xo,
Kate